SPLIT AT THE ROOT, a BROADSIDE by ADRIENNE RICH; on HANDMADE PAPER by JOCELYN H. COHEN, with DESIGN, HAND-COMPOSITION, and PRESSWORK by NANCY POORE.

Broadside, 10.5x16 inches, handmade paper with deckled edges, printed on one side only.

Published by the Helaine Victoria Press in Martinsville, Indiana. This is one of only 50 copies printed on handmade paper, out of a total printing of 250 copies.

From the Colophon: "This edition of fifty broadsides was printed on a platen press on paper handmade by Jocelyn H. Cohen. Design, hand-composition, and presswork are by Nancy Poore...an additional two hundred copies [were printed] on Torino cover paper, and the type subsequently redistributed, in December 1982 at Helaine Victoria Press in Martinsville, Indiana."

GOOD condition: The broadside has a scattering of light foxing, and some normal waviness to the margins from being hand pressed on handmade paper.

Helaine Victoria Press, was a feminist press focused on women's history. It was co-founded in 1973 by Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Victoria Taylor Poore. It is most remembered for its series of women's history postcards, but it also published some broadsides by noted feminist authors. The press ceased printing in 1990.

Here is the text of the broadside:

******I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile. The woman who first heard oppression named and analyzed in the Black Civil Rights struggle. The woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male violence. The woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding are also accountable. The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor's language sometimes sounds beautiful. The woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act.******